Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up when filtering for English only. It’s worth noting that for all the official support Macs ever saw in gaming, they never represented anything better than about 5% of the market.
I don’t even remember my progression. I do remember what first piqued my interest though. A guy came from BUIT (Barn-och-ungdoms IT enhet), which no longer exists, and he was troubleshooting some IT stuff at my school back in 2003. Being the nosy and tech-interested bratty nerd that I was, I hovered around the guy. He was super nice, and had no problem with my prodding questions about his laptop, which was running Red Hat Linux. He explained in simple terms what exactly that meant, and it stuck with me.
Then, years later when I found out about Ubuntu (at the library I think) and the fact that they sent out LiveCDs I was like “Yes please!” and the rest is history. I didn’t use Linux for many years, between having hardware that didn’t play nice with it, and just not feeling like it. Then the other year I went back to Linux and been using it since.
Every so often I boot into Windows to do some texture work in Substance Painter, but I don’t think that’s going to last. I’m very keen on trying Armor Paint, and if I like the workflow there I might as well wipe Windows entirely.
Now, if only I could run Linux on my work PC.
Nice!
For me, I went to the local community college in high school, and an old guy was in my Java class and gave me a FreeBSD CD. I installed it and played around with it for a year or two, but still used Windows. When I went to uni, I got an Ubuntu CD on campus and installed it on my rental, and later that year the Windows XP install had issues but Ubuntu was fine, so I switched.
I had that at my last job, but my current one uses macOS. At least it’s close enough to Linux on the CLI…
I’m stuck on Windows 11 at work. It’s not a bad laptop, but Windows is insanely slow. Opening the commandline isn’t instant. Explorer takes well over a second to open. It’s like treacle.